The Curtain Falls
March 14, 2020
The days are getting longer, but winter still holds New England in its chilly grip. Looking out at the empty harbor, no boats bob merrily on moorings, and the still dark water reflects the last rays of the setting sun and scattered streetlights. John and I sit in a half-empty theater, with vacant seats clustering around small groups of two or three people. We are the brave or the foolhardy few still willing to go out with the crowd. I’m glad we take this opportunity because neither of us knows what is coming. When the curtain closes tonight on the Irish singers, step-dancers, and fiddlers who perform at the St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn, the curtain closes on the familiar rhythms of life.
I don’t realize until months later that this night is another inflexion point in my life. There are specific years and events that mold and define who I am as an adult: 1983, I stop drinking; 1996, my oldest brother dies; 2000, my husband dies; 2002, my dad dies; 2003, I am diagnosed with breast cancer. Then I have sixteen years of relative calm, defined as no deaths and no disease.
In 2019, my mother dies. And here I am, barely a year later, and a new inflexion date is added: 2020, the day the curtain drops.
The year between my mom’s death and this last bit of normalcy had already been a time of reflection on my own life. At about the same age I am now, my mother had given up a safe job she’d had for eight years to become a massage therapist. She was always an artist first, and doing massage freed up her time to be creative. It provided a flexible schedule to take art classes, to work on her pastels and acrylics and charcoal sketches. My friend John, brave enough to accompany me to this last show, had given up the corporate life in middle-age to become a photographer. Now he caters to pay the bills and documents weddings and bar mitzvahs. But he is happier, healthier, still glad he made the change.
I think back to a conversation I’d had with my mom not long before she died. We were planting daffodils for next spring’s blooms, always a bright spark of color after the snow-caked winters. Mom didn’t like talking about the past and saw no need to reflect on the whys and wherefores of her life. She took each day as it came, believing God and the angels would provide. It was an attitude completely contrary to my ordered existence, where I had backup plans for my plans. I had been contemplating a change of careers, bored with a pharmaceutical career that paid well but depleted my energy, with little reward other than a paycheck. As Mom dropped daffodil bulbs into the small holes I dug, we talked about what it was like growing up in the Bronx in the 1940s.
“Kathy and Terry and me, we would roller skate in the streets and grab the bumper of a car to pull us up the hill. If the weather was bad, we’d play jacks in the hallway of our building. In the winter, Pop would take us ice skating in Central Park. It was different then.”
As we paused at the end of the row of newly planted bulbs, the earth safely enfolding them until spring, I asked: “What did you dream about being when you were a kid?”
“All I ever wanted to be was an artist,” she responded without hesitation.
And yet, good Catholic girl that she was, she married a man probably much like her father and raised six children. When she was well into her fifties, and the last child left the house to go off to college, she moved to a one-bedroom apartment. For the first time in her life, she lived alone. After twenty-five years of feeding and cleaning up after people, then scraping by after her divorce from my father, the rest of her life belonged solely to her.
On the four-hour drive from her place in New York to my apartment in Boston, I replayed her answer: “All I ever wanted to be was an artist.” Beside me on the passenger seat were her latest incarnations: intricate mandalas in shades of sapphire, turquoise, and teal. The mandalas weren’t my favorites, but I took them home and put them with the other pieces because they were her gifts to me. In the art collection I had were still lifes of ripe yellows pears and matching gold-embossed vases, all beautifully rendered in soft pastels on a gray-blue background. There were acrylic landscapes verdant and overflowing with spring flowers. There was one small charcoal sketch of my older brother when he was just a boy, before the schizophrenia ravaged him. In this sketch he was still young and unbroken, his hair curling softly around his face.
As the miles unfolded over the rippling Berkshire hills, I thought about my unpolished and unpublished short stories, scribbled down on long flights and tedious layovers in crowded airports: my collection of widow’s stories, begun when my husband died, which had helped me to disentangle my grief and anger and confusion at being a thirty-eight-year-old woman planning funerals. My running stories, gleaned from a decade of trying to outrun sadness, languished. I’d written about the Connemarathon through the wild windswept mountains of western Ireland where there were more sheep than runners and spectators combined. I’d dashed off a short essay about running the Paris Marathon in between the lumpectomy for cancer and the start of radiation therapy, when the only emotion I had was rage. I brought my endlessly edited novel with me everywhere on a USB stick but never seemed able to finish it. These nascent works remained suspended in digital files, moving from computer to computer but never going out into the world.
Mom never got to see the daffodils bloom, but she would have been happy to know the new owner of her place would enjoy them. Over the winter, she’d moved in with my sister after she’d had to stop driving. We had hoped that after Mom moved in with my sister, she would adjust to her new home, but it was too much for a ninety-year-old woman. Within a few months, she had her first fall, as if the move itself had hastened her decline. Over the next six weeks, she deteriorated rapidly. She went from making her own meals and creating colorful mandalas to being bedridden, having lost the use of her legs. Each weekend I drove the 150 miles to my sister’s house to help them both out and spend time with my mom. The final weekend I drove down, my mom slipped into unconsciousness overnight. Maybe she had a small stroke; maybe she just decided it was time to go. We all knew what her wishes were as she’d been quite emphatic about them. “I don’t want to be hooked up to a bunch of machines in a hospital bed.”
I sat in the quiet of her apartment, holding her hand and intermittently reading passages from the Bible. When she took her last breath, my fingers rested lightly on her frail wrist, the skin papery and warm, as I tried to feel her pulse. I kept waiting for the next breath, watching the second hand turn to minutes on the old-fashioned wall clock, but the next breath never came. As our last act of love, my sister and I bathed Mom’s body in warm water softly scented with rose oil. Votive candles flickered in the darkness of her small apartment, and her artwork was everywhere: brilliant poster size collages tacked to the wall, acrylic landscapes made three dimensional with artificial flowers. On the bedside table, her fine point markers lay crosswise, holding open the sketchbook she’d been using just a few days earlier.
As we waited for the hospice nurse to come and officially declare Mom’s death, we dressed her in the outfit she wore to her grandson’s wedding. Long flowing black pants and a purple flowered, V-necked blouse that she loved from the moment she saw it. My sister gently placed a stargazer lily—Mom’s favorite flower—between her folded hands. It wouldn’t seem right to have her go away without her hands cradling something colorful and blooming. I put a little makeup on her face, her skin already cooling but still soft. I brushed her hair as lightly as possible, as if she could still feel the bristles on her tender scalp. There would be no wake or open casket, but we wanted her beautiful before the morticians came in a dark van in the middle of the night to take her away.
My sister suggested we give away some of her artwork at the funeral service, so over the next few days, we sorted through hundreds of pages of sketches, pastels, watercolors, mandalas, and acrylics. One pile was the keep pile that would remain with the family; the other pile was the funeral pile to distribute. Mom loved to give the beauty she created to anyone who entered her life, no matter how briefly. No one left her house without a handcrafted card or a vibrant collage of birds and flowers. Giving her art away at the funeral would be her final exhibition, the one she’d never had in real life. In the large church hall where we gathered for a light meal after the funeral service, we laid out her artwork on the large tables and balanced her pictures against the walls.
“Please take a piece of Mom’s artwork home with you. Smile and think of her when you look at it,” I said, as friends and family filtered through the condolence line.
“Can I take two?” a stranger asks—a friend of my sister’s, I assumed.
“Of course, take as much as you’d like.” Mom would love that people were asking to take her artwork, that they wanted it on their walls.
Winter slowly ripened into spring and life resumed, just without Mom. The acute grief receded, but I kept going back to that conversation. “All I ever wanted to be was an artist.” Mom made everything she touched more radiant, and every time I’d visit she had a new project: a poster size bird and flower collage cut out from old calendars or a bunch of lilies she wanted me to help her put in the garden. I tried to convince myself that I wrote every day: memos and logistical plans and standard operating procedures. But it wasn’t the writing I longed for and none of it made my heart sing. In the year after Mom’s death, I was back and forth to the UK three times, then Chicago, New Jersey, and Australia. On those endless flights, I researched low-residency creative writing programs and sporadically edited my novel. How did she squeeze time to paint or sketch in between the demands of six children? Somewhere over the Atlantic, cocooned in my business class seat, weeping silently, I came to realize that my gift to my mother—and to myself—was to find the writer in me again.
Then the pandemic hit.
The step-dancers John and I wildly applauded that winter night have long since faded into the wings. The low-residency writing programs I’m researching suddenly become no-residency programs. The low residency programs become fully remote, and the field of potential writing programs expands as all the programs are online. Overnight, my job becomes home-based, and I have hours of my life back. I’m not rushing to the train, to the office, then home again, to dinner, to bed, then repeat. The incessant travel of the previous year is literally cancelled overnight when a travel ban is imposed. All the distractions of work and travel and stress that pulled me from my writing are removed. I am at home, with hours back in my day, and I hear my mom’s voice: “All I ever wanted to be was an artist.”
With the world in lockdown, I find the best online writing program available. The days once spent winging across the Atlantic to a regulatory agency inspection, I spend learning how to write again. Hours once wasted commuting, I learn how to read like a writer. I devour books the way I did when I was a teenager, and my tastes are indiscriminate. Agatha Christie, Janet Winterson, Colm Toibin, Louise Penny, Billy Collins, Margaret Atwood, Andy Weir, Janet Galloway, Paul Durcan. I craft poems about my mom to keep her alive and with me, and in so doing, I realize she must have struggled with the same fears I do. I try not to pass judgment on my own writing. I am happy that I still have the words. When my mom first started to decline, the first thing she lost was her words. I feared I had lost mine too.
I sort through Mom’s old family albums, filled with images of people long dead. In small, square black-and-white photos I see her in her twenties, always with a group of friends. Young women and men are at Far Rockaway Beach in stylish one-piece bathing suits lounging on beach blankets. Another image of her and her twin shows them, arms around each other’s shoulders, standing outside an apartment in the Bronx. I see her as a new mother with my oldest brother only a toddler. She’s holding Kevin’s arms as he learns to walk and my dad is standing beside them, ready to catch Kevin if he falls. Both Kevin and dad are dead now these twenty years, and I’m glad that Mom will be with them now.
As people die in thousands, then tens of thousands, and eventually hundreds of thousands, I write my way through the pandemic. Yet I tell no one. I feel a shallow guilt that the pandemic has enabled me to work from home and that I have time and freedom to write.
“It must be so hard, living alone and everything,” an old friend says to me from her crowded house, her three kids yelling in the background, her husband out of work. I don’t tell her that I am thriving in the midst of chaos and a plummeting economy. I am vibrant.
Each day I morbidly read the body count in the New York Times. I cannot get through a day without checking how many more people died overnight. Each one of those numbers, those people, had a dream, a family, a life. I am grateful that my mom is not having to live through this. That she won’t die alone, her family not allowed into the hospital for fear of contagion. I’m glad I had the chance to make her beautiful, have a large family farewell, and send her artwork out into the world. When I read the state-by-state death counts, I wonder how many people died thinking, “I always wanted to be a writer. I always wanted to be an artist. I always wanted . . .”
I write poems and send them out into the world the same way my mom showered her artwork on anyone who crossed her path. I write without expectation, struggling to structure the sentence, set the scene, tell the story. Most of all, I simply write. I remind myself before I go to bed at night and when I wake up in the morning.
“I am a writer.”
And I whisper to my mom every day. “You are an artist.”
March 14, 2021
A year into the pandemic, and this time the St. Patrick’s Day Celtic Sojourn is broadcast via a livestream. The days are getting longer, and the sun is finally beginning to melt away the winter frosts here in northern Massachusetts. In this past year, I have written tens of thousands of words. I write poetry for the first time since I was a melodramatic teenager. I begin to blog, even when I have little to say. I start seeing the world again as a writer. I don’t look to the future because I can’t see where this pandemic ends. Each day I get up, I say good morning to my mom and look at the brilliant artwork adorning my house. The images are full of color and light and flowers. And I wait for the curtain to rise.
-Babz Clough
Babz Clough lives north of Boston, Massachusetts, and is a writer, storyteller, and aspiring poet. She currently halfway through an MA in Creative Writing, focusing on creative nonfiction and poetry. In addition, she regularly participates in StorySLAMs for The Moth and MassMouth, and recently participated in her first Moth GrandSLAM. Find her on Instagram @babz286